NORMANDY 

Rouen-Hotel de Bourgtheroulde-Palais de Justice

History and WWII

Cathedral

Gros Horloge and Place Vieux Marché

Palais de Justice Bourgtheroulde

St.Maclou-Aitre St.Maclou

Church Saint Ouen-Musée des Antiquités

Tour Jeanne-Musée Secq des Tournelles-musee des Beaux Arts

Musée de Faience-Musée Flaubert

Turn right into the market into the rue de la Pucelle and discover the HOTEL DEBOURGTHEROULDE, (call it Boortrood), a jewel of a Renaissance building, undoubtedly the most beautiful Renaissance edifice of Rouen. Built in the 16th century by Guillaume II Le Roux, counsellor of parliament. It’s private but as the porch is often open try to peek inside. It is owned by a bank now who let’s us sometimes enter the courtyard and admire the octagonal staircase tower, a surviving Gothic flamboyant end building and a fine gallery around the side. Friezes and wall sculptures are beautiful but a bit tarnished by weathering. But look at the majestic facades and chiselled turrets.
Glimpsed up a side street in the rue des Juifs, is the PALAIS DE JUSTICE, obviously the most beautiful non-religious building of the city. Another gothic masterpiece, begin 16th century, by the same Le Roux, also architect of the cathedral considered by most as one of the world’s richest examples of Gothic architecture. But if you are a bit architecturally minded you can notice the slow conversion from later Gothic to Renaissance. And it has not only survived restorers (often incompetent idiots) war and desecration, but also the restorer’s restoring the work of restorers. I hope you can follow me! :-)
The Norman parliament had its quarters here in the 16th century. An it is not surprising that during later restoration works the foundations of a Jewish building (12th century) in the Romanesque style was discovered, probably a synagogue, since this area was the Jewish quarter in Middle Ages. 

As parliament it as a private place, hidden behind towering walls, its beauty not for the public eye. Now you can admire the façade in the large interior courtyard with its central turret of a great decorative wealth. Notice how decoration increases the higher the wall is. Downstairs the windows are quite simple and sober, the first floor is already more sculpted, and the superior level is an orgy and glorious profusion of turrets, pinnacles, flying buttresses, lantern widows, arches, tracery and crockets rising like champagne bubbles against the steeply sloping roof. Superb!!

The great Corneille, Rouen’s dramatist son, must often have thumped the inside of the Justice palace when addressing the court as a lawyer.

To the left of the cathedral is the RUE SAINT ROMAIN, skirting the Archbishop’s palace. At no.70 an elegant façade abundantly chiselled with iron works. No.74 a gothic house with sculpted capitals of the 15th century. And discover the CHAPELLE -D’ORDRES where unfortunately only the ruined windows survive. It is here that the final act of the trial of Joan of Arc took place. The next day she would be burned at the stake. In some of the houses opposite lodged the canons that condemned her to death. In this street, as elsewhere in the city, the old wooden houses attract sympathetic businesses, and the displays of dealers in antique furniture, books and prints put a welcome brake on “progress”.
Next, the church of Saint-Maclou.

Bibliography

A holiday history of France, by Ronald Hamilton (London-Hogarth press), Region Normandie, ses merveilles, ses cicatrices, by Louis Letellier (ed. Cloison, Rouen 1995), Routard 1998 (Hachette, Paris), Rouen, ville martyr, by Patrick Deware (Ed. Dargelle, 1998)-France today, by John Ardagh (Secker and Warburgh, London)The Identity of Normandy, by Fernand Braudel (Fontana Press, London)